Lenin - Collected Work - v. 29 - March-August 1919

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are real class enemies of
the proletariat.
(18) Another bourgeois distortion of socialism is, on the
other hand, the “Centrist” trend, which is equally broad
and international, which wavers between the social-chauvin-
ists and the Communists, advocates unity with the former
and is attempting to resuscitate the bankrupt and putrid
Second International. The only really proletarian and revo-
lutionary International is the new, Third, Communist
International, that has actually been founded by the for-
mation of Communist Parties out of the former socialist
parties in a number of countries, particularly in Germany,
and is gaining the growing sympathy of the proletarian
masses in all countries.
105DRAFT PROGRAMME OF THE R.C.P.(B.)
* * *
THE BASIC TASKS OF THE DICTATORSHIP
OF THE PROLETARIAT IN RUSSIA
In Russia today the basic tasks of the dictatorship of the
proletariat are to carry through to the end, to complete,
the expropriation of the landowners and bourgeoisie that
has already begun, and the transfer of all factories, railways,
banks, the merchant fleet and other means of production
and exchange to ownership by the Soviet Republic;
to employ the alliance of urban workers and poor peasants,
which has already led to the abolition of private ownership
of land, and the law on the transitional form between small-
peasant farming and socialism, which modern ideologists
of the peasantry that has put itself on the side of the prole-
tarians have called socialisation of the land, for a gradual
but steady transition to joint tillage and large-scale social-
ist agriculture;
to strengthen and further develop the Federative Republic
of Soviets as an immeasurably higher and more progressive
form of democracy than bourgeois parliamentarism, and as
the sole type of state corresponding, on the basis of the experi-
ence of the Paris Commune of 1871 and equally of the
experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917-18,
to the transitional period between capitalism and socialism,
i.e., to the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat;
by employing in every way the torch of world socialist
revolution lit in Russia to paralyse the attempts of the im-
perialist bourgeois states to intervene in the internal affairs
of Russia or to unite for direct struggle and war against
the socialist Soviet Republic and to carry the revolution
into the most advanced countries and in general into all coun-
V. I. LENIN106
tries; by a number of gradual but undeviating measures
to abolish private trading completely and to organise the
regular, planned exchange of products between producers’
and consumers’ communes to form the single economic entity
the Soviet Republic must become.
The Russian Communist Party, developing the general
tasks of the Soviet government in greater detail, at present
formulates them as follows.
In the Political Sphere
Prior to the capture of political power by the proletariat
it was (obligatory) necessary to make use of bourgeois democ-
racy, parliamentarism in particular, for the political edu-
cation and organisation of the working masses; now that
the proletariat has won political power and a higher type
of democracy is being put into effect in the Soviet Republic,
any step backward to bourgeois parliamentarism and bour-
geois democracy would undoubtedly be reactionary service
to the interests of the exploiters, the landowners and capi-
talists. Such catchwords as supposedly popular, national,
general, extra-class but actually bourgeois democracy serve
the interests of the exploiters alone, and as long as the land
and other means of production remain private property
the most democratic republic must inevitably remain a
bourgeois dictatorship, a machine for the suppression of the
overwhelming majority of working people by a handful of
capitalists.
The historical task that has fallen to the lot of the Soviet
Republic, a new type of state that is transitional until
the state disappears altogether, is the following.
(1) The creation and development of universal mass organ-
isations of precisely those classes that are oppressed under
capitalism—the proletariat and semi-proletariat. A bour-
geois-democratic republic at best permits the organisation of
the exploited masses, by declaring them free to organise,
but actually has always placed countless obstacles in the
way of their organisation, obstacles that were connected
with the private ownership of the means of production in a
way that made them irremovable. For the first time in
history, Soviet power has not only greatly facilitated the
107DRAFT PROGRAMME OF THE R.C.P.(B.)
organisation of the masses who were oppressed under
capitalism, but has made that organisation the essential
permanent basis of the entire state apparatus, local and
central, from top to bottom. Only in this way is it possible
to ensure democracy for the great majority of the popula-
tion (the working people), i.e., actual participation in state
administration, in contrast to the actual administration
of the state mainly by members of the bourgeois classes as
is the case in the most democratic bourgeois republics.
(2) The Soviet system of state administration gives a
certain actual advantage to that section of the working
people that all the capitalist development that preceded
socialism has made the most concentrated, united, educated
and steeled in the struggle, i.e, to the urban industrial
proletariat. This advantage must be used systematically
and unswervingly to counteract the narrow guild and narrow
trade interests that capitalism fostered among the workers
and which split them into competitive groups, by uniting
the most backward and disunited masses of rural proletari-
ans and semi-proletarians more closely with the advanced
workers, by snatching them away from the influence of the
village kulaks and village bourgeoisie, and organising and
educating them for communist development.
(3) Bourgeois democracy that solemnly announced the
equality of all citizens, in actual fact hypocritically con-
cealed the domination of the capitalist exploiters and deceived
the masses with the idea that the equality of exploiters
and exploited is possible. The Soviet organisation of the
state destroys this deception and this hypocrisy by the
implementation of real democracy, i.e., the real equality
of all working people, and by excluding the exploiters from
the category of members of society possessing full rights.
The experience of world history, the experience of all
revolts of the exploited classes against their exploiters shows
the inevitability of long and desperate resistance of the
exploiters in their struggle to retain their privileges. Soviet
state organisation is adapted to the suppression of that
resistance, for unless it is suppressed there can be no ques-
tion of a victorious communist revolution.
(4) The more direct influence of the working masses on
state structure and administration—i.e., a higher form of
V. I. LENIN108
democracy—is also effected under the Soviet type of state,
first, by-the electoral procedure and the possibility of hold-
ing elections more frequently, and also by conditions for
re-election and for the recall of deputies which are simpler
and more comprehensible to the urban and rural workers
than is the case under the best forms of bourgeois democ-
racy;
(5) secondly, by making the economic, industrial unit
(factory) and not a territorial division the primary electoral
unit and the nucleus of the state structure under Soviet
power. This closer contact between the state apparatus and
the masses of advanced proletarians that capitalism has
united, in addition to effecting a higher level of democracy,
also makes it possible to effect profound socialist reforms.
(6) Soviet organisation